Sentiment Analysis of Tweets on Afghan Women’s Rights Using Naive Bayes Classifier: A Data Mining Approach to Understanding Public Discourse

Abstract

Social media platforms have become critical arenas for public discourse on global human rights issues, providing real-time insight into public opinion and emotional responses. This study examines Twitter conversations surrounding Afghan women’s rights from April 2023 to January 2024, focusing on the digital reflection of international concern. Using a dataset of 4,845 cleaned English-language tweets, we performed sentiment analysis employing the VADER lexicon for initial sentiment labeling and a Multinomial Naive Bayes classifier trained on TF-IDF features for automated sentiment classification. The results reveal a predominance of negative sentiment (47.4%) compared to positive (38.3%) and neutral (14.3%) sentiments, indicating widespread frustration and alarm regarding the restrictions and violations faced by Afghan women. Exploratory data analysis highlighted temporal trends in tweet volume and engagement, with significant peaks correlating to key political events and policy announcements. The model achieved an overall accuracy of 67.5% in classifying sentiment, with particularly strong performance in detecting negative and positive tweets, while neutral sentiments were more challenging to classify accurately. Feature importance analysis identified critical terms that influenced sentiment classification, revealing a linguistic pattern reflective of advocacy, concern, and hope within the discourse. Temporal analysis of sentiment proportions demonstrated fluctuations aligning with real-world developments, underscoring the dynamic nature of online public opinion. This research contributes to understanding the role of social media in amplifying human rights concerns, especially in politically unstable regions, and demonstrates the utility of sentiment analysis for monitoring global digital activism. The findings offer valuable insights for policymakers, activists, and scholars interested in the intersection of technology, public opinion, and human rights advocacy. Future research is encouraged to incorporate multilingual data, multiple social media platforms, and analyze sentiment shifts in response to international interventions to provide a more comprehensive picture of digital society engagement on this critical issue.